The 7 Minute Solution

I’m intrigued by the proliferation of explicitly time-based self-care plans, like the 7 Minute Workout. They aren’t a new phenomenon – we’ve had 30 day diets and things like NaNoWriMo for decades. But it feels like the duration of these plans are getting shorter and shorter.

The Science

Part of the change is surely due to science. We know now that high-intensity interval training can produce better results in terms of fitness than longer but less intense exercise, by putting our heart and muscles under shorter, sharper periods of stress. Crucially, we know the mechanisms of why this works – it’s not just an observation, we can really see how our body’s cells and organs respond to stress.

But there are different degrees of rigour and certainty in science. A lot of the self-care plans based on psychology and neuroscience are, to my mind, based on much fuzzier research. I don’t mean to say that the researchers in question are incompetent or lying; it’s that their research is taken lightyears too far by companies marketing products.

Let’s imagine researchers conduct a study where they place university students in an MRI scanner and observe their brains while they’re listening to different sounds for ten minutes; maybe some students hear music, some hear white noise, some hear speech, and so on. They find that the students who hear the music have a different kind of brain activity in regions associated with focus or relaxation, or whatever, and the students also report that they feel more relaxed afterwards. So perhaps something is going on with the music, or that type of music, and it’s worthy of more study.

But then let’s say a company sees this research and makes an app – 10 Minute Relaxation (I’m making this up) – which plays calming music to you. They say their app is proven ‘by science’ to make you more relaxed in just ten minutes. Well, clearly not; what ‘works’ on university students sitting in an MRI may not work at all on a 50 year old sitting on a bus.

In any case, it doesn’t matter whether it works or not, it sounds good and people want a fast solution proven by science. The app makers can point at the study and the apps’ users get a nice placebo effect.

The Speed

Not along ago, the time in London was different from the time in Edinburgh. Not that it mattered – it took so long to travel between the two cities, and the journey was so unreliable, that knowing the time down to the minute would have been pointlessly expensive (clocks and watches being pretty high tech back a century or two ago).

But now we have smartphones, which means that we agree on the time down to the second, and we can know our ETA via Google Maps and Uber down to the minute. We can be more efficient – no more idly waiting for ten minutes at the coffee shop for friend, because they can let us know they’re running late; we can spend that ten minutes on something else. Maybe it’s playing a game or reading Facebook – or maybe it’s something productive, like a 10 Minute Relaxation session.

The gaps in our busy lives are shrinking, which means that self-care solutions must also shrink.

The Anxiety

Any one of us can become an exceptional artist or writer or games designer or YouTuber or actor. Any one of us can lose our jobs in an instant. Any one of us can have their entire field of work vanish in just a few years, thanks to automation and globalisation. So we are in competition with everyone else, which is a recipe for serious anxiety. It means you always need to be improving yourself; and it’s easy to see why shorter solutions can feel more manageable and rewarding than, say, the 7 Month Workout, or the 10 Year Relaxation session.